On canaries, coal mines, and journalism
On canaries, coal mines, and journalism
Journalists aren't the canaries in the coal mine. Journalists are repressed for reporting on the canaries
It’s a common refrain when talking about press freedom: the media is the canary in the coal mine in the dissolution of democracy.
As local news across North America is eaten alive by rent-seeking investors, journalists and pundits rightly grieve a vital staple in a functional democracy. Without an adequate supply of local journalists, information about municipal councils, school boards, and local businesses would be reduced to press releases and rumours spread on social media and content mills.
Locals who volunteer their time as council watchdogs (I’m convinced every municipality has at least one, usually a perennial candidate in local elections) would persist, to be sure. But the decline in local media means the loss of entire jobs — performed by individuals who (usually) aren’t often also candidates in local elections (again, usually) — dedicated to independently investigating these public bodies, and fact-checking and contextualizing the information coming out of them.
In Gaza, journalists are continuing their work in the face of genocide, and they’ve been killed by the dozens since Oct. 7, including targeted killings by the Israeli military — on top of other attacks against and arrests of journalists.
As countries fall into war or sink into authoritarianism, journalists are under threat around the globe — in India, Sudan, Senegal, and Turkey.
As a journalist, I’ve always struggled with the self-importance espoused in this industry.
The work done by journalists repressed by autocratic governments in the aforementioned countries is nothing short of heroic, and the idea of good journalism as a force for positive change is one of my core values. It’s why I do this work.
But if we focus too heavily on the risk to journalists, we risk subordinating to journalism the very reason for doing journalism — the victims of corruption, marginalization, and political violence who journalists report on.
The canaries in the coal mine aren't journalists. Journalists are just among the first to notice when the canaries have stopped singing. (This, of course, is notwithstanding the fact that, in a place like Gaza, the journalists targeted and killed are casualties of the same repression brought upon the rest of the population there.)
But even then, this represents an idealized vision of journalism — it filters out the journalism that typically isn’t the subject of attacks on journalists. Authoritarians don’t target journalists because of a dogmatic opposition to the dissemination of information. They specifically target journalists who shed light on the victims of supremacist ideologies, of corruption and power.
When autocratic regimes go after journalists, they aren’t taking on the ones who act as a government mouthpiece, the propagandists who toe the party line and even participate in the repression of marginalized communities by contributing rhetoric as ammunition.
When I say that, you likely think of presenters on Russian propaganda channel RT; on Israel’s Channel 14, which promotes the brutal military assault on Gaza; or on Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, the radio station that helped incite genocide in Rwanda. And that is, indeed, where my mind first goes as well.
But we have no shortage in North America of journalism that upholds power.
The journalism in question may rail against the governing party of the day, and the policies they institute, but it ultimately serves to uphold the same power structures as the governing party.
It isn’t enough for journalism to challenge the government of the day. For journalists to uphold democracy, we have to challenge the structures of power itself.
The work of Adam Zivo in the National Post and of Paul Johnston in Global News may take aim at government policies, but the brunt of their reporting isn’t power — it’s drug users who are condemned to the toxic supply by the moral panics their reporting fuels.
There are differences between Zivo and Johnston, but those differences are largely surface level — where Zivo pushes prohibitionist rhetoric in the active tense, Johnston does so under the pretence of neutrality.
It may feel to them like speaking truth to power when decriminalization and safe supply are policies implemented by the government. But both are ultimately watered down versions of policies advocated by the marginalized people most affected by prohibition.
They are policies that never actually changed the power structures that hurt communities like the DTES in the first place. They uphold police as the primary agencies in drug policy, and they maintain the view that drugs — not poverty and inequality, nor trauma and mental health issues — are the problem, and that the problem is inherent to drugs.
And while they purport to believe criminalization isn’t the answer, criminalization is nevertheless what we get from them.
This kind of journalism doesn’t get at root causes of issues, but instead attacks symptoms. It takes a narrow, individualized approach to issues that are societal and systemic in nature. It often rightly examines bad behaviour by those in power, but too frequently fails to question the power itself or engages in both-sidesism.
When journalists are arrested in Canada, it’s scarcely* while reporting sympathetically to power. Brandi Morin was reporting on the raid and dismantling of a tent city in the dead of winter in Edmonton. Amber Bracken was embedded with the Wet’suwet’en opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline when it was raided. Savanna Craig was covering a sit-in at a Scotiabank protesting its investment in Israeli defence contractor Elbit. (*The exception is Dave Menzies, whose entire schtick is being a nuisance.)
When Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre attacks journalists, he isn’t attacking people like Zivo. He’s attacking those whose journalism questions him and his politics.
By speaking in overly broad terms about the power of journalism, we flatten it into the idealized version that promotes democratic values.
Journalism has an incredible ability to do good in the world. But when done poorly or in bad faith or in service of power, it is equally capable of harm and of enabling depravity.
At best, this kind of journalism simply isn’t a canary. At worst, it’s participating in the canary’s death.